Man skips tip option at local coffee shop. Then the manager shames him for not leaving any: ‘I’m not tipping if I placed the order standing up’
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Tip prompts have quietly crept into almost every corner of American retail. What once used to be reserved for waiters now applies to self-checkout kiosks. Most people just click through and move on.
But one customer's coffee shop order turned into a full managerial standoff over tipping.
‘Tips are earned, not given, correct?'
Content creator Maxwell (@maxwellsvision) shared a story from a neighborhood coffee shop run-in over tipping. His video has since accumulated more than 1 million views.
Maxwell said he ordered a turkey wrap with bacon. He doubled the protein, skipped the cheese, and asked the worker if she could add sriracha inside the wrap. The employee apparently told him he'd have to add that himself. Maxwell also grabbed a Celsius energy drink to go with his whole order.
At checkout, Apple Pay presented him with a tipping screen offering 18%, 20%, or 25%.
“I press skip every single time unless they do something outlandish to me,” Maxwell said. “Maybe if she said, ‘I can put sriracha on your wrap,' then I would have tipped you. Maybe. But … You just took my order.”
Maxwell said the employee's demeanor visibly shifted the moment she saw he hadn't tipped. Once his order was ready, the worker wasn't the one who handed it to him, but her manager.
“You couldn't leave a tip?” the manager asked as she handed over his food. Maxwell replied, “Give me my wrap, respectfully. And no, I'm not leaving a tip, because y'all couldn't put sriracha inside my wrap … Tips are earned, not given, correct?”
‘Can we normalise just paying your employees?'
The manager told Maxwell that “in this neighborhood, people tip 18% minimum.” Maxwell said he had no plans to leave the neighborhood, but would be happy to tip generously once the shop started “compensating” his requests too. He went home, ate the wrap, and ultimately ended up annoyed he'd spent $18 for something “so mid.”
Commenters were largely on Maxwell's side, with one person writing, “I'm not tipping if I placed the order standing up.”
“Only people you should be tipping are drivers and servers,” another viewer commented. “Everything else is optional.”
“Can we normalise just paying your employees??” another wrote. “Like why is that put on the customer?”
One viewer shared a similar bit of tipping irritation.
“I was asked to tip at a frozen yogurt place,” they wrote. “I poured the yogurt, I put the toppings on, and I put it on the scale. I did everything, all the employee did was click a few buttons, why would I tip?”
When did tipping in America stop being mostly for waiters?
The Hill reports that “America's tipping habit originated in 1800s Europe,” and subsequently “wealthy Americans returned from European vacations and adopted the practice at home.” For most of the 20th century, though, tipping stayed largely confined to table-service restaurants, hotels and similar jobs where a server's base pay depended on it.
“Following the Civil War, tipping spread across a range of service jobs worked by Black Americans, ‘to basically continue slavery,' said Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in a Time magazine interview,” The Hill writes. “Many white employers refused to pay salaries to Black workers, forcing them to rely on tips.”
The recent expansion into nearly every retail transaction, however, has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic. The Hill also reports that touchscreen payment systems began presenting counter-service customers with default tip options of 18%, 20%, or 25%. Cornell University tipping researcher Michael Lynn found that even as overall tipping frequency dipped slightly in 2021 and 2022, tip sizes at quick-service and takeout restaurants specifically rose during 2020 and 2021 as customers tried to support struggling businesses.
@maxwellsvision you really think you deserve a tip ???
Post-pandemic: The rise of “tip creep”
University of New Mexico sociologist Eli Wilson calls the resulting pattern in the wake of the pandemic the “tip creep phenomenon.” Wilson told the University of New Mexico that it has accelerated over the past decade, as tipping prompts spread into retail environments that never traditionally included them.
According to The Hill, “an industry survey from Toast, a management-software firm, found that roughly half of quick-service restaurants, such as Starbucks and McDonald's, now offer a tipping option, up from 38 percent in 2020.”
The Hill said a separate Forbes survey also found tipping rates of 36% at food trucks, 35% at coffee shops, and 31% at takeout restaurants.
Buzz News reached out to Maxwell via email.
